In the past few years, India has witnessed a surge of metal acts from remote parts of the country. Whereas over the years, metal bands would mostly be seen hailing from cities and urban centers where there’s hardly any dearth of infrastructural requirements, the trend is gradually shifting.
With this paradigm shift coming from the penetration of heavy metal culture into smaller towns and remote regions, came a duo belonging to the picturesque region of Ladakh, India. Langdarma and rBapho, both consisting of the same members, have taken a twisted interpretation of black/death metal music and painted it with their own cultural background of where they hail from.
On Sunday, January 8th of 2023, the duo representing Landarma/rBapho will take the stage at DEAD OF WINTER organized by the Primordial Shriek due to take place at the Sujata Sadan in Kolkata. To mark this occasion, we, at Headtilts, had the privilege to have them share with us their journey till now and what’s waiting for them on the horizon, as they warm up to take Kolkata by storm with their intriguing take on extreme metal camaraderie.
Here are the excerpts of our interaction with the members of Langdarma and rBapho:
Q: Welcome to Headtilts. Let us start with a little bit of introduction. How would you define your sound and identity?
A: We formed rBapho back at the end of the year 2018 and during that time we were into old-school death metal bands and there was a whole rabbit hole in this sub-genre where we found so many underrated bands with their demos on YouTube and Bandcamp. I remember listening to Blood Incantation’s demo ‘Astral Spells’ and completely got hooked to that raw feeling and the way they produced that promo tape their central theme revolves around the cosmos and since my childhood I’ve always been enthralled with all this space stuff, I still remember that day when I was in 3rd or 2nd standard and one of our teachers told us about exoplanets and all that, my mind completely blew away just by knowing that many planets are revolving around the sun. That was the day when these things sparked a curiosity in me and discovering Blood Incantation was the best experience ever! It was a perfect blend both musically and aesthetically as well. I wanted to go in that same direction and being born in a Buddhist family my parents are so devoted to praying and all that religious stuff, whenever there’s some sort of ritual in Buddhism be it a funeral or an annual festival, the monks would play their traditional instruments with its flavor to it.
When we formed rBapho we intended to bring all these three elements together and see what comes out. In 2019 we released our demo ‘Astral Death’, which has three originals and one cover from Pestilence. We put out our demo on Bandcamp and after a few months a fanzine by the name of VM Underground did a review of our demo it was a positive response from them and yeah after that review was published we started to get some attention. There’s an independent record label from Malaysia by the name of Necrolatry Records that sent an email to us and wanted to distribute our demo on cassettes and that was huge for us.
Q: Coming from the scenic beauty of Ladakh, how was it growing up as a musician, and what was the prevalent music scene during your formative years?
A: Back then when we were kids, Ladakh was pretty distant from the rest of the world. During summers we can get fruits and vegetables plus electricity but during winter time there’s no access to electricity (there will be electricity for only 8 hours) or fruit and vegetables because of the heavy snowfall all the roads that connect Ladakh to the rest of India is completely blocked for six months. Ladakh has a rich culture, we have all these folk songs and very unique musical instruments, but it was very hard to find someone who could teach you western instruments. I started playing guitar when I was 13-14 years old, and I couldn’t find anyone who could teach me how to play guitar back then, we didn’t have the internet at our homes, and would just open YouTube and play a tutorial video. That was not possible! But we were lucky that we found a band from Ladakh the band name was Checkmates it was a rock n roll band and they were way ahead of their time so they taught us me and our lead guitarist how to play guitar, the theories, techniques, etc and they introduced us to Hendrix, Deep Purple, etc. I’m grateful that we met them and that helped us to be what we are today. It was really hard to form a band because there weren’t that many people who were playing any musical instruments even if there were the music taste would be completely different.
Q: What are your influences? Tell us about the factors that drove you to play this kind of music.
A: As I’ve mentioned before the early death metal bands played a huge part in shaping our music as well as our cultural background. Prior to that, I used to listen to a lot of pop-punk bands especially Green Day, their way of writing and structuring the songs was so gravitating for me because it was so simple and powerful. I always try to keep our songs in that same fashion (you don’t always have to shred to sound heavy) and you can easily find that pop-punk influence in Cosmic Boneyard from our Astral Death demo and playing death metal I’d say it was a gradual process first it was pop-punk, then thrash, emo and so on.
Q: You are going to play at the inaugural edition of DEAD OF WINTER. What are your thoughts regarding this event?
A: We’re excited about it! B.G from Kapala and the entire crew of Primordial Shriek are putting so much effort into this, and we’re really looking forward to seeing the other bands performing live. I’m sure it’s gonna be an awesome experience!
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Q: Is this your first time playing at Kolkata? If yes, then what are your expectations? If not, then what was your experience in the past?
A: This is our first debut ever actually, we have never played outside of Ladakh, we did organize a DIY gig (Rolangs Death Fest) two times in Ladakh the crowd is much smaller as compared to what you guys have here in Kolkata. We’re hopeful that everything will go smoothly and have a good time with other pals!
Q: The line-up of this year’s DEAD OF WINTER features some amazing extreme metal bands from several parts of the country. What are your thoughts about it?
A: We’re very excited and looking forward to watching them play live. I’ve never seen any bands from War noise metal and black metal bands performing live before and yeah also with the thrash metal bands, I’ve listened to their couple of songs and they are tight for sure. So we’re excited to see how they execute it live.
Q: What can the audience at the show expect from you guys? Is there any new material you are planning to perform there that the fans can be excited about?
A: We’ve been working on some new materials lately from both rBapho and Langdarma which will be coming out on our upcoming Eps, we’re excited to see what kind of response we’ll get from the crowd and we hope that they’ll like it.
Q: Anything else you want to say to your fans and the crowd that is gonna throng to the gig on January 8th, 2023?
A: Yeah we are looking forward to meeting you all guys at the show hopefully in large numbers have fun and we’ll definitely give our best and it will be worth spending a few bucks to keep this going on. So pull up to Sujata Sadan on the 8th it’s going to be awesome!
Tickets for DEAD OF WINTER are available at BoShow
